Harvard Professor Avi Loeb is not satisfied with NASA’s comments this week that the interstellar object streaming through our Solar System is a normal comet.
In his blog, Professor Loeb stated:
NASA’s representatives should have emphasized what we do not understand about 3I/ATLAS rather than insist that it is a familiar comet from a new birth environment…We should not “judge a book by its cover,” because we all know about the Trojan Horse which appeared unthreatening to the guardians of the City of Troy. When monitoring an interstellar visitor, we should not fall prey to traditional thinking but scrutinize new interpretations. The public resonates with science as a learning experience, where the collection of evidence leads the way to new knowledge rather than reinforces variants on past knowledge.
Trojan Horse? That is certainly an alarming way of looking at this foreign object. Professor Loeb is not backing down one bit on his concerns, and refers back to his 12 puzzles, one of them being:
Its nucleus is about a million times more massive than 1I/`Oumuamua, an interstellar object discovered in 2017, and a thousand times more massive than 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019, while moving faster than both, altogether with a likelihood of less than 0.1 per cent (see here and here). This suggests that it may have targeted the inner solar system rather than being drawn from the reservoir of icy rocks.
Again, using terms like “targeted” is certainly garnering a lot of interest by outside observers.
Maybe this will be settled next month with new images. Or maybe this will be a continuing controversy. Even if it goes nowhere, I think we can expect another book from Professor Loeb.
Our Awesome Universe 